January 19, 2017

... let's look back to Inauguration Week 2009. Here are the shrines to Obama I observed in the (now defunct) Borders Bookstore:

That title "What Obama Means" provoked me at the time: "Spare me. Whatever is in that book can — I will bet you — be skimmed and understood in less than one minute."

That reconfirmed my practice of reading on line to get my political news and analysis. In our era of fake news, these are fake books* and fake magazines. You don't want to get sucked into the passive experience that awaits you inside these rectangular objects. You've got to keep it digital so you can cut and paste and blog as you read. Save yourself.

I won't go to a bookstore this week, but if I did, I wonder how the front tables and racks would look. I'm sure there are no comparable shrines to Donald Trump. Maybe there are, once again, shrines to Obama: What Did Obama Mean?
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I was just in the Barnes & Noble in Tysons Corner (a yuuge mall perched on the western edge of the Washington Beltway). No "shrine" to Trump. I did see a few copies of The Art of the Deal on one table but that was it.

Trumpland receives higher proportion of a Federal dollar than the liberal Coastal states which also means that the real economic output of Trumpland is lower than 30%.

Trumpland is not the cultural engine, money engine or technology engine of the US.

In fact, Trumpland is a "taker" because it cannot stand on its own two feet. And, that is why it elected Orange Don because it isn't capable of looking after itself. Let's not even go down the pork-barrel subsidies.

The hated elitist liberals can stand on their own feet. We can survive and thrive whoever is President. Trumpland needs a father figure to look after them. Babies. Sad!

So many magazines that are no longer relevant. I don't miss them. And Borders. I miss that almost as much as I miss Stacys.We took our kids to the one in Stonestown every week. We were there at midnight a couple of times upon the release of the latest "Harry Potter". Quite a lot of useless books, but "Dreams" is still worth reading. Very instructive.

You don't want to get sucked into the passive experience that awaits you inside these rectangular objects. You've got to keep it digital so you can cut and paste and blog as you read. Save yourself.

This is an interesting take on the future of reading, books and information dissemination and I agree with Althouse.

I'm a fan of electronic books and obviously online reading of news etc. I like the electronic books in that you can make notes, comments, bookmarks that don't mar the book itself. That you can make copies of passages and especially that if you are reading and come across a word, concept historical reference....you can instantly look it up and research more information. Leading you down all sorts of fascinating rabbit holes.

However....to me, there is a certain charm and comfort in real, tactile books. A historical connection to the past. I buy and search out in thrift stores, antique stores, those books that are classics, those that seem unusual, important, quirky or are ones that I want to read multiple times. Those don't require batteries or electricity to read :-)

I enjoy picking up a book and remembering where and when I bought or found it.

Either way...just read. I've know people in my life who claim to have never read a book (electronic or tactile) for leisure or for learning and get all of their information from the tee-vee. I am astounded. How can that be!

How Obama Won by Chuck Todd. Obama won because most American people thought we should have a 'person of color' in the White House and he, as a candidate, was personable and seemed to stand for American values. I wrote in Ron Paul both times.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

No record and none will survive his leaving the office.

Trump, for all his crudities and he has many, has accomplished a lot in his life,

DBQ observes: However....to me, there is a certain charm and comfort in real, tactile books. A historical connection to the past. I buy and search out in thrift stores, antique stores, those books that are classics, those that seem unusual, important, quirky or are ones that I want to read multiple times. Those don't require batteries or electricity to read :-)

Now that I have a winter home where I have room for a few books and can get goods delivered to my door, I ordered a stack of 'real' books. While I love my kindle, the more personal experience of holding a paper version is luxury. Besides, I was a paper chemist at one time and would hate to see paper become obsolete!

Yeah, those weird little shrines to Obama are a little disturbing. But I'm generally repelled by things that indicate fanatical adulation, hero worship, and displays of devotion toward other human beings. There's certainly lots of historical figures and a few living people who I think very highly of, whose talents and accomplishments I'm impressed and inspired by. But I've never had a desire to deify them or to never question anything they've ever said or done. I don't understand those feelings. I guess I must be missing whatever gene predicates that sort of behavior.

Instead I'm a cynical jerk who expects that presidents (or people in general) are very fallible. I expect them to let me down. And yet I'm an optimist.

His intellectual credentials were fake: neither he nor the academic institutions protecting him would ever release his record.

But the obvious fakery does not refute the Althouse point: that he was once treated as the black messiah, the magic negro of the left. That this man could be treated in that way, with shrines and adulation, is further proof that the left really has won the culture wars

You could not be more wrong. I'm not even a breedist loser. I love all breeds. And they love me back. That's partly because I don't eat them. Dogs know.

But you know, after today, Obama will be free to hate/eat all the dogs he wants to hate/eat. He'll finally be free to get rid of Bo and the other dog. Sham pets. Surely someone will be willing to rescue them. Probably not the woman who Obama let his dog bite in the face. But someone will. Hopefully someone who won't mistr-eat them.

I remember seeing a children's book about him after the 2008 election, prominently displayed at Target. I think it was this one. I thought I had been transported to Maoist China. Such cultish worship. Bleah. Being rid of that is itself enough reason to celebrate Trump.

“Since 1990, the Sun has been in the declining phase of the quasi-bicentennial variation in total solar irradiance (TSI). The decrease in the portion of TSI absorbed by the Earth since 1990 has remained uncompensated by the Earth’s long-wave radiation into space at the previous high level because of the thermal inertia of the world’s oceans. As a result, the Earth has, and will continue to have, a negative average annual energy balance and a long-term adverse thermal condition.“The quasi-centennial epoch of the new Little Ice Age has started at the end 2015 after the maximum phase of solar cycle 24. The start of a solar grand minimum is anticipated in solar cycle 27 ± 1 in 2043 ± 11 and the beginning of phase of deep cooling in the new Little Ice Age in 2060 ± 11.

Hey!! That's a great idea. Only property owners should be able to vote, especially on bond issues and taxes that are to be levied on their properties to PAY for those bonds. *** People with actual skin in the game should be only ones to vote.

Hey....maybe we could make it so that only REAL CITIZENS should be allowed to vote in other elections for city, county, state and federal elections. What a crazy idea...right?

*** Actually, this is a real rule in California for assessments in water districts and other special districts. For instance if the water/sewer district wants to put an assessment onto your property in order to build a new plant or other expansion.....not to raise rates for users but to assess your property, the vote goes to the property owners. AND the votes are actually rated by the value of your property. Rate increases go to all the users of the system and not just property owners. Everyone who is a user gets an equal vote.

If one property is worth 1 million dollars and the other property is worth 10,000 the amount of assessment on the million dollar property is obviously going to be much more. Therefore the million dollar property owner's negative vote will count relative to the value of the property. This is to prevent an unfair loading of costs onto one or two people by those who will not be as adversely affected. The million dollar guy can still be outvoted, but it takes many more people.

It is a fair system.....Amazing that California let THAT one slip through the cracks.

Around here the only bookstores that remain are specialized: children's books, religious books, and textbooks. The popular bookstores of yore are gone, the lone survivor closed last summer and even there the books had become a minor item pushed off to one side. Supermarkets now have small book sections, but only for the popular books of the day.

Regarding that whole 64/36% hoo ha, are we measuring gdp output by the location of the company headquarters, or the location of the actual activity producing the gdp. Specifically thinking about all the "American" companies whose products are "made in China" and elsewhere. Similarly, does Allen County get credit for Fort Wayne's GE factory, or does that roll up into some consolidated GE total in the Headquaters county?

Here are the shrines to Obama I observed in the (now defunct) Borders Bookstore:

Until the campaign & election of Barack Obama, I never realized the depth of white guilt among white liberals. I knew it was there; I knew it played a big part. But, I didn't think it was so foundational to their world view.

I think in their hearts they thought that Obama could somehow cleanse them of their racial sins & of their ancestors.

Trumpland receives higher proportion of a Federal dollar than the liberal Coastal states which also means that the real economic output of Trumpland is lower than 30%.

Trumpland is not the cultural engine, money engine or technology engine of the US.

In fact, Trumpland is a "taker" because it cannot stand on its own two feet. And, that is why it elected Orange Don because it isn't capable of looking after itself. Let's not even go down the pork-barrel subsidies.

The hated elitist liberals can stand on their own feet. We can survive and thrive whoever is President. Trumpland needs a father figure to look after them. Babies. Sad!

You might want to rethink that position.The other 30% can feed themselves.You can't

Freder, I did read it. That's how I knew the measure was GDP. The cite skimmed over the 64/36 split fairly quickly, and then spent the rest on policy matters. I didn't notice any specific information on how they allocated GDP by county. Since the argument and supposed problem is geographic, the geographic allocation question I raised should be central to whether the 64/36 distinction is meaningful.

I know unknown is the one who keeps citing this distinction, but by extension your posts strongly suggest that you believe it meaningful as well. Demanding that others do the work to prove you right or wrong is pretty presumptuous.

The little Accuweather widget on the NYTimes link for the 2016 3Rd Straight Warmest Article is fun to play with. The NOAA and Goddard guys can estimate temperatures around the world down to fractions of a degree. Yet you can look at cities less than 50 miles apart and minimal elevation changes or geographic features and see huge differences using their calculations. Greeley Colorado, a major oil and gas producing area about an hour from Denver saw 2.9 degrees below normal while Denver and Boulder were above by 1.7 and 1.8, respectively. Louisville KY saw and increase of 2.5 while Ft Knox, about 40 miles due south was increased by 4.7 degrees; my favorite so far is Little Rock at 2.6 degree increase while N. Little Rock right across the river was up by 1.7. There is no denying temperatures can move up or down, its a given they are moving up but, this world-wide stuff by 1 and 2 sig fig is really silly. T